Open Journals at Memorial University
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A Tale of Two Clinicians: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Provision of Therapy
No full textThe influence of COVID-19 is far-reaching and will likely have long-lasting effects on social work practice in general and specifically on the provision of therapy. In this article, the authors, one a registered social worker and doctoral student and the other a registered psychologist and assistant professor, will discuss the substantial impact of COVID-19 on their private practices, utilizing a narrative framework. The primary focus is the crumbling of boundaries, including the lack of delineation between home and work life, privacy and confidentiality issues for both clients and therapists, and challenges with online therapy delivery. In addition, the authors discuss the alterations to caseload and case management, the forced and sudden transformation of the very nature of therapy, the unique challenges faced by clients from varying demographic backgrounds, and the experience of collective grief, shared trauma, and parallel processing. The article also highlights the unique challenges that two women therapists have faced during this global pandemic while carrying the bulk of household and child-care responsibilities
Necropolitics and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Indigenous Peoples of Tripura, Northeast India
No full textThis article focuses on the necropolitical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lived experiences of the Indigenous Peoples of Tripura, Northeast India. Our central argument is that Indigenous bodies are governed to die an untimely death. By drawing from Mbembe’s (2003) theoretical framework of necropolitics, we uncover the consequences and experiences of necropower. Necropolitics perpetuates the exclusion of historically marginalized groups by permitting disposability during difficult times. Through technologies of control, necropolitics enables a sovereignty over mortality and construes life as the deployment and manifestation of power. In doing so, during extraordinary events, life becomes strategically subjugated to the power of death. In this study, we argue that the biopolitical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic not only affected individuals unequally but also forced hospital staff to decide who would breathe their last breath. Moreover, Indigenous Peoples’ lived experiences of untimely death manifest the necropolitical technologies vested within hospitals where decisions are made over life or death
Navigating the Brick Wall: School Settlement Workers’ Responses to Exacerbated Inequities for Newcomer Students in COVID-19
No full textFor newcomer students, inequities exacerbated by COVID-19, including racism, unfold within their educational landscapes. School settlement workers perform a critical role in newcomer students’ educational trajectories. COVID-19 has intensified the importance of school settlement work, yet school settlement workers remain an under-researched and under-recognized group of professionals. Anchored in an anti-racist, multidisciplinary framework, our article traces how COVID-19 measures in schools have magnified inequities for school settlement workers and newcomer students. Our data, drawn from a community-based project, consist of virtual focus groups held with school settlement workers located in a Canadian prairie province during the height of the pandemic, and the findings emerge through a critical approach to the methodology of appreciative inquiry. We illuminate systemic realities to contradict discourses that the pandemic does not discriminate and demonstrate how COVID-19 protocols are used to justify and obfuscate schooling exclusions along racial lines. We analyze themes of (in)visibility of settlement work, whiteness and racism, and resistance through Sara Ahmed’s (2012, 2017) metaphor of the brick wall to animate the tensions of settlement work in schools during COVID-19. We conclude with school settlement workers’ recommendations to increase recognition of their critical role and to support their work during and beyond the pandemic. We call on institutional wall makers to respond to settlement workers’ recommendations and actualize institutional commitments to newcomer students and families
Neo-Liberalism and Post-Crisis Recovery: A Review of Literature on 2008 Crisis and COVID-19 Pandemic Recovery
No full textDiscussions of the causes of the inequitable impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic strike a similar tone as the same discussion of the 2008 financial crisis. In this review of the literature on post-2008 financial crisis and the post-pandemic economic recoveries, neo-liberalism is identified as an influential force in both crises’ inequitable impacts on communities experiencing marginalization. Calls for a radical new and more just health, social, and economic system can be found during the financial crisis and currently during the pandemic. However, the post-crisis recovery measures taken by governments across the Global North after 2008 rejected these calls, instead implementing policy measures that signalled a recommitment to the very same neo-liberal system that had created its inequitable impacts. This critical review of the literature discusses how the historical post-crisis recovery policies of the 2008 financial crisis might shed some light on what is to come during the recovery period of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, in addition to what possible alternatives to neo-liberal post-crisis economic recovery might look like
Resisting Ideological English: Agency and Valuing Against Reified Abstractions and Erasures
No full textBy preserving the intent of the original French title of Franz Fanon’s great work, Les Damnés de la Terre as The Damned of the Earth, Lewis Gordon makes a critical contribution beyond his already notable contribution to Fanon Studies. At the start of What Fanon Said, Gordon says in the notes, “The title of [The Wretched of the Earth] is one with which I have much disagreement, so in this book it will be referred to in its proper translation as The Damned of the Earth” (2015, 151). Hearing in Gordon’s point here a philosophy of translation, I will explain how the proper translation of “les damnés” as “the damned” serves our understanding of resisting ideological language such as “the wretched” or connotations of wretchedness in daily language, which erase being, agency, and the value of living beings. “The damned,” a noun born of and still a verb, connotes the active colonial damning as a historical process driven by culpable agents.1 Put differently, “the damned” “preserves” in the meaning of the words, the reality or fact of active colonial damning as a historical process driven by culpable agents; it does so in naming that action is done upon peoples, who are by that fact, colonized peoples. Gordon thus provides remedy to the ideological consequences of the better-known translation of the title of the work that would have the reader or listener more readily call up the sense of “unfortunate or unhappy people,” which the “wretched” “translation” connotes.2 I develop and defend the theoretical and socio-political centrality of Gordon rejecting “the wretched” in favor of “the damned,” preserving in translation the essential agency of those doing the damning on the condition of the damned
Dismantling the Violent Discourse of the State of Israel: On Zionism, Palestinian Liberation, and the Power of Language
No full textWhen European powers held their infamous Berlin Conference in 1885, during which they agreed to divide the African continent among themselves, they did not employ such terms as enslavement, illegal seizure, exploitation, or genocide. Instead, they made references to “instructing the natives,” “bringing home to them the blessings of civilization,” and encouraging “the maintenance of peace (and) the development of civilization” (General Act 1885). Similarly, when Britain and France received Mandates from the League of Nations in the 1920s to serve as the supposed caretakers of their colonies in Africa and the Middle East, there was hardly any reference in the language of these Mandates to British and French geopolitical interests in serving this role; instead, many positive references asserted the need for allowing colonized countries access to their “own schools for the education of (their) own members in (their) own language,” among many other misleading claims (League of Nations 1922)
Social Work Education During COVID-19: Students’ Perceptions of the Challenges and Opportunities of Online and Blended Learning
No full textAs the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, educators have needed to rapidly adapt the ways of delivering study materials to facilitate learning for university students. This article discusses the findings from a series of focus groups conducted with social work students to explore their perceptions of the move towards online and blended learning and teaching. It reports on their initial apprehensions, summarized in four key findings: (a) interactions with staff, (b) a sense of community, (c) assessments, and (d) opportunities to grow. Although these consultations occurred prior to the beginning of the 2020/2021 academic year, students’ accounts raise important questions about ways in which feelings of belonging to a learning community can be cultivated and sustained as blended approaches to learning and teaching become more embedded in social work training. The article concludes by highlighting the need for ongoing considerations around creating a sense of community in an inclusive, supportive, and sustainable way. In so doing, it underlines the value that intersectional and critical research can add to these discussions as a means of promoting social justice in social work education
COVID 19 and the Resurgence of Outdoor Activities: A Personal Narrative and Observation
Get PDFThe suspension of K-12 classes in NL due to COVID 19 happened quickly and seemed to shock us all. The severity of the situation did not hit home until classes were suspended and announcements were made about the possibility of no more classes for the 2020 school year. It is important to write about this as a narrative because if we look at history, many observances of past historical events come from personal diaries, stories transcribed from those who witnessed an event, or from people who kept journals of everyday life. This article is written from my perspective of what happened in our town, Cartwright, NL, during the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. I would like to share personal views on how I saw a resurgence of outdoor exploration in the spring season
Everyday Evil in Palestine: The View from Lucifer’s Hill
No full textThis article is an attempt to cast content into the popular phrase used by activists in the Palestine solidary movement that in order to understand and be moved by the nature of colonization in Palestine all that is needed is a short presence on the ground. I chose to visit a hill in the South Hebron mountains to illustrate this point. From this vantage point, the matrix of modern-day colonialism becomes visible to the naked eye but only unfolds in full when it is contextualized historically. As such, it also gives a new meaning to the Palestinian phrase, “al-Nakba al-Mustamera,” the ongoing Nakba, and becomes another place and chapter in the geography of disaster since 1948
Review of Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production by Nili Belkind
No full textThe intensification of both Zionist repression and grassroots resistance across historic Palestine in May 2021 starkly contrasted Israel’s indiscriminate colonial terror with a revolutionary surge of young people embracing their Palestinian roots through mass anger and political culture on the streets. Musicians were drawn into the confrontation, notably with the violent arrest of contrabassist Mariam Afifi in Jerusalem, the siege of Lydd targeting DAM and other musicians, and with Israel’s aerial obliteration of the Mashariq studio in Ansar, Gaza. Highlighting the progressive nationalism at the heart of Palestinian counter-mobilizations, singer Rola Azar threw herself into leftist campaigning in Nazareth, while bands of street musicians accompanied strike action with songs of sumud (steadfastness) and resistance in Haifa, Ramallah, and many other locations. In Gaza, as with the Israeli bombing of the Said al-Mashal theatre in August 2018, youth have again performed Ibrahim Touqan’s “Mawtini” (“My Homeland”) and other anthems in the rubble. Musicians have mobilized for Palestine